The Story of the Human Body

The Monkey in Tampa

For three years, a rhesus macaque lived in the suburbs of Tampa, Florida, raiding Dumpsters and outwitting animal control. He became famous during the 2012 Republican National Convention, mugged for cameras, and was finally captured in October of that year. Daniel Lieberman opens his book with this monkey because he wants you to understand something uncomfortable. The Mystery Monkey of Tampa Bay was a creature designed by millions of years of evolution to peel fruit in Indian forests, now subsisting on cold french fries behind a strip mall. He looked absurd. He looked sick. He looked, in Lieberman's quiet observation, exactly like the rest of us.

Lieberman is a paleoanthropologist at Harvard who has spent his career studying how human bodies came to be the way they are. His thesis sounds modest at first and then keeps growing teeth. The bodies you and I walk around in were assembled by natural selection over six or seven million years to do three specific things. Walk long distances on two legs. Eat a wildly varied diet of plants and lean meat we had to chase down or dig up. Cooperate with a small band of relatives and friends to survive in conditions of intermittent scarcity. Almost nothing about a modern office building, a supermarket, a couch, or a paved road resembles the world that shaped us. The gap between the body you have and the life you give it is what Lieberman calls mismatch, and he believes it is killing us slowly while we look the other way.

This is the story of how we got these bodies, why so many of them are breaking down, and what we keep refusing to do about it.